The official blog of the Campaign for the American Reader, an independent initiative to encourage more readers to read more books.

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Nine top novels with really long sentences

Mauro Javier Cardenas's debut novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, happens to have a number of very long sentences. One of nine novels he loves, all which have some very long sentences, as shared at Publishers Weekly:

The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez

The long sentences here agglomerate the era of the patriarch, retelling it as hearsay, which accommodates what everyone remembers such that sometimes, in midsentence, someone interjects and says do you remember when he would give orders to go and take that door away from here for me, they took it away, put it back again for me, they put it back, and then the interjection ends and the agglomeration continues, and perhaps because I read these sentences right at the beginning of my attempt to become a novelist, I never forgot how wonderful it is for multiple voices to exist in the same sentence.